Generally, advertising that is more relevant to those viewing the advertising is more effective in spurring desired sales. That is, advertising that is more relevant to a recipient is more likely to result in a purchase decision by the recipient. Advertising that is directed to a recipient based on the recipient's geographical location can be used to tailor the advertising content to the recipient and is one way of increasing the relevance of the advertising. It has been found generally that such location-aware advertising is more effective than undirected “broadcast” advertising.
There are many techniques for determining geographic location of a recipient for purposes of directing advertisements to the recipient. One form of location-aware advertising is at a point-of-sale. Such point-of-sale advertising depends on the physical presence of a person at a location as an indicator of products or services for which the person might be interested. Given that the user's location is essentially the only data item about the user that is known, such techniques are not especially likely to generate relevant advertising and are not especially successful.
One means for determining location for advertising is to use a mobile telephone, also referred to as a cell phone. Using a cell phone for location determination has great appeal, due to the large number of persons who carry a cell phone and the great market penetration of such use.
When a user who subscribes to a cell phone service makes a call, the user's cell phone communicates with the service infrastructure via cell towers. As the user of the cell phone moves about, the cell tower handling the user's call changes according to the user's location. The nearest cell tower usually handles the call. The cell towers are typically spaced apart at distances depending on terrain and usage patterns. Typical cell tower spacing can be as little as approximately ½ mile (1 km) up to as much as 25 miles (40 km). Thus, the cell tower being used by a cell phone helps determine a very approximate location of the cell phone. Some cell phone carriers, by prior arrangement with their cell phone subscribers, may utilize cell phone call records to promote marketing.
It should be apparent that cell tower spacing is not of especially great precision in determining geographic location. Moreover, cell phone location can be extremely transitory, because the cell phone user could be merely travelling through a cell area toward a final destination. This further calls into question the reliability of location determination by cell phone usage. More recently, location determination by the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system has been integrated into many mobile devices, such as cell phones (often referred to as “smart phones”) and other portable communication devices. Accuracy of position location by the GPS system depends on many factors, such as terrain, weather, visibility of open sky, and the like, but generally provides a geographic location with an accuracy in a range within about thirty feet (10 meters) to less than ten feet (2-3 meters). Such accuracy is an improvement over cell tower spacing for location-aware advertising, but not all cell phone users have GPS-enabled devices, because GPS phones are a relatively recent arrival to the market, and not all users have agreed to make their location data available, due to privacy concerns.
It should be apparent that dependency on physical presence alone, or on mobile devices, for determining geographic location information is not sufficient for reliable directing of advertising content for increasing the likely relevance of the content. What is needed are more reliable techniques for increasing the relevance of location-aware advertising. The present invention satisfies this need.